A wonderful review of a new biography of this writer.
I love her writing although I haven’t gone near it in years. And now – reading this article – I kind of fall in love with her the person:
A culture is known by the stories it tells, and Southern stories are rooted in such connections, place and family and neighbors and friends, in shared memories passed down like recipes. Welty knew that in the South, there is a we to the stories. We are all members of the Delta wedding. A family story is a family possession, not for a moment to be forgotten, not a bit to be dropped or left outjust added to. No good story ever became diminished. You stay at funerals till the tent comes down. You show up at the family reunion, even if you have to escape from prison to do it. You repeat the stories you share. For Welty, memory was a living thing, through which the present can reclaim the losses of the past.
I once drove the 700 miles from North Carolina to Jackson to tell Eudora Welty how much I admired her. Writers knew where her house was; shed lived there a long time. In the end I lost my nerve. I sat in the car across the street for hours, and then I drove back home. Many years later, I met Miss Welty in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel and I told her that story. She laughed. Honey, was that you? I almost called the police on you!
Then, in a moment of kindness, she taught me the best lesson I ever learned as a writer. She said, Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet. It was a lesson no one ever understood more profoundly than she did.
